A few members of my extended family have had it done, and compared notes at the last reunion. To nobody's great surprise, a few people's paternal lineages were different from what they previously believed. We're a family of blended families for generations, tho, so as far as I know, nobody was especially asshurt about it. (Those that might have been are already dead.)

It's worth reading up on how some of the analyses work and what you really can or can't tell from DNA and how accurate it is. Some of the stuff is pretty misleading, especially the "you are 23% Luxemburgish, 16% Portuguese etc." type statements.

I recently did mine through the National Geographic Genome 2.0 Project. The basics on that one is that it's more about population migration than it is personal ancestry Meaning that they're not really looking at or for anything "recent", say the last couple thousand years. The most specific they gave me was a likely breakdown based on different markers:

I, and two of my kids, have done 23andme. As expected, I'm 97.7% Ashkenazi Jew, with one Finnish and one Iberian ancestor sometime between 1680 and 1770.

My kids are definitely mine.

So, I take it that you did the test to find the outliers, eh?

My daughter bought the test for me as a gift. Then she bought it for herself.

I would have loved to have seen my dear wife's results. She, too, was Ashkenazi, but three of four grandparents came from the Russian Pale (the fourth was Polish). But, when she was born, her family joke was that she was a Korean refugee baby, because she had a full head of straight black hair and epicanthic eyefolds. I suspect that back in the 12th to 15th centuries, her ancestors may well have been in the way of the advancing Mongol hordes. I suspected that she had Mongol ancestry that manifested with her.

All of the genetic testing I do is free and has to do with certain medical conditions (pre eclampsia and autism specifically) that my family has. I don't think they'll find a genetic smoking gun for either condition, but they've not been doing much research so I'm hoping it will prime the pump for investigation into the causes.

I can give a flying fuck about where my ancestors came from. A lot of my family did geneological research and I think it's the most boring, meaningless thing ever.

My parents did this a while back, and I think they did ancestry.com. I was bummed to find out that we were completely of Northern European descent. No brothers at all!

Of course, after reading about several recent events, a person who has ever been involved in any crimes should stay away from DNA testing. You know that roach you threw on the floor at the Dead concert in 1974? Busted!

I can give a flying fuck about where my ancestors came from. A lot of my family did geneological research and I think it's the most boring, meaningless thing ever.

Oh, man, yeah, some of my extended family got into that, and you did NOT want to get cornered by them.

I told one of them he should write a book, and the "instead of telling me about it" was silent.

The whole thing with catching serial killers is sort of cool, but I worry more about the fact that there's virtually no established law in what else it can be used for, especially once they manage to pierce the HIPAA veil like they did. That information could be used for almost anything, really. Identifying genetic markers for diseases or just traits you don't like for various redlining purposes. Deny them loans or jobs or health insurance or whatever.

And it always but fucking ALWAYS fucks me off that the creeplords build profiles of people based on information other people have provided.

But a year later she did a test with another genetic testing company and persuaded her brother to do one too. This time there was a surprise. The email with the results included a chart that she struggled to understand - but something written underneath immediately caught her eye: "Estimated relationship: half-sibling."

Yup. And as loathsome as it is that Facebook compiles contact and other information about non-users from other people, those DNA databases are compiling genetic information about non-users from other people.

And in the US at least, there are practically no limits to what they're allowed to do with it. Imagine what an insurance company would do to get at that.

My parents did this a while back, and I think they did ancestry.com. I was bummed to find out that we were completely of Northern European descent. No brothers at all!

Yep. I got pretty much the same result. They broke it down in to three separate areas...England and NW Europe, Ireland and the Celtic periphery, and then central France. No surprises at all...well, the central France thing is as 'wild card' as it got. The 'NW Europe' delineation included the Rhineland, Saxony, and the nether region countries. Big whoop.

In the meantime, they din you for all sorts of extra cost add-on services....